The extreme cold weather in North America has heavily impacted airlines, and follows on from
the hugely destructive 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. And this was in addition to the ongoing
disruptions due to outages of aging airline computer systems; scarcely a month went by in 2017
without multiple major IT-related incidents.

It is increasingly clear that minimizing the impact of disruptions is critical to keeping
costs down for airlines.

Arriving at the École Polytechnique in Paris, Saclay with approximately 200
people to participate in the NDC Hackathon was both exhilarating and a first
time experience for the entire 2e team.

Upon getting settled, the
keyboards around us were smoking, which at first was distracting, but after a
while the sound of murmur and keystrokes became very relaxing and we went into
the "zone". We had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to
develop from the start, but we were also aware of the time constraints and we
really wanted to make something functional and useful. So we decided to
keep things simple and focus on those key functionalities we thought would
really matter.